Shared passion provides a bridge

Published 6:48 pm, Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Matilda Gish shelling lima beans at her grandparents' house this summer. (Jennifer Gish)

Matilda Gish shelling lima beans at her grandparents' house this summer. (Jennifer Gish)

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For the last couple years, Jennifer Gish hasn't been able to be in the kitchen without her daughter, Matilda, asking to be a sous chef. Although when she was younger, the request was to be "shoe chef." (Jennifer Gish) less

For the last couple years, Jennifer Gish hasn't been able to be in the kitchen without her daughter, Matilda, asking to be a sous chef. Although when she was younger, the request was to be "shoe chef." ... more

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Matilda Gish helps her mom tend to the small garden at their house. This summer, she started taking vegetables to the social skills program offered by her school district for kids like her, who are on the autism spectrum. (Jennifer Gish) less

Matilda Gish helps her mom tend to the small garden at their house. This summer, she started taking vegetables to the social skills program offered by her school district for kids like her, who are on the ... more

Shared passion provides a bridge

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"I have an idea. What if, for the beginning of each week of school this year, we make a treat for you to give to a grown-up there, any grown-up you want, and then we keep a journal of what food you took in and which person you brought it to?"

It's evening, just after Matilda had a bedtime snack of apples with three accompaniments — peanut butter, maple butter and extra sharp cheddar — and ranked them. We're lying on my bed relaxing and talking before I send her under her own comforter for the night. The topic is one that she doesn't like: Second grade is about to start. But it's been a good night for us. She seeded and chopped cherry tomatoes from our small garden to make salsa for Taco Tuesday. We were connecting over her passion for food, the one thing that seems to bind us when autism keeps her locked inside of herself in most every other way.

I thought her affinity for food, both growing it and preparing it, was enough of a gift in itself, the counterbalance to every call from the school that she's melted down, pushing over desks, or worse yet, hitting another child. Food has been my passion since I was a little girl learning to make sauerkraut and strawberry jam at my mother's hip and setting a record for repeat borrowing of a cookbook at the school library.

Matilda's autism diagnosis came when she was 4, not long after a meeting with her pre-K teachers where they said they were worried about her "sensory issues." Recognizing what that was code for, I sensed my own heart thundering in my chest.

It has been a recipe of parent seminars, IEP meetings, psychological assessments and therapists of every shade since. I could have filled a stockpot with the tears I shed on the hardest nights, when I worried that the kid who could read fluently before kindergarten and beats me at mental math wouldn't be able to hack public school.

But I'm a solver, even if autism is a 1,000-piece puzzle and I'm blindfolded. This summer, I noticed her checking the progress of our untamed vegetable garden daily, waiting to see the eggplant hang low and the cherry tomatoes bronze in the sun. She was attending a summer program for kids on the autism spectrum, and each morning she'd fight it the way she did nearly every day of regular school. Sometimes, I'd have to dress her myself. Occasionally, I've carried her to the car. Then one day, hoping to reach her, I asked if she wanted to bring tomatoes to her teachers.

She headed into school with little arms heavy with produce, a 4-foot-tall farmers market wearing, remarkably, a smile.

Driving away that day, I had a ridiculous idea that grew less ridiculous with each stoplight. "I'll just keep doing this when regular school starts in the fall," I thought. She could take produce every day until the growing season is over, and then we'll make a bunch of stuff on the weekends for her to bring in after that — brownie mixes, jams, apple butter — and she'll have that to look forward to, to punch through the anxiety harder than the pills she swallows twice a day.

By the time I got home, I'd become slightly more realistic, planning to send her each Monday with something new, easing the weekend transition. But if it works, we'll become our own catering company and our Common Core is going to include coring apples for scratch-made pie.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm asking too much of this gift. Food? Really? Often with kids on the spectrum the fixations, a coping tool for anxiety, are on something else — trains, dinosaurs, video games or any number of things I don't care about. Finding out she must contend with the challenges of autism was a nightmare. Cuddling on the couch reading cookbooks with her is a delicious fantasy.

A couple weeks ago, we camped, and her brother was in the cabin, leaving just her and I sitting in lawn chairs waiting for the charcoal to gray so we could load the grill with zucchini and chicken sausage. She wrapped her arm around my neck.

Her little hand around my shoulder and her eyes on the coals, I heard "I love you," and I gasp.

Anytime I say, "I love you," which is probably a dozen times a day, she answers with "I don't love you." It's been that way for years. I know, deep down, she doesn't mean it, but it's become a tick of hers, one that crushes me each time.

Before I could draw a breath, I heard "I mean ... I don't love you" and the moment was over. She was back on her script, but I finally had the right kind of tears in my eyes.

Will a jar of homemade salsa have an impact at school? I don't know. But this puzzle of autism is awfully hard to fit together, and we're going to try.

"So what do you think, Matilda? Would taking food to the grown-ups at school be a thumbs up or thumbs down?"

She sits up on the bed, her head titled toward the comforter, and sets her thumbs at a 45-degree angle.

"Thumbs diagonal," she says. Then her voice crescendos into a question: "I don't have to love my teachers to bring food to them?" She looks me straight in the eyes this time, I can tell she doesn't want to shatter the prospect of taking peach preserves through the tall wooden doors of her elementary school.